* Posts by T.a.f.T.

120 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2011

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Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

T.a.f.T.

Re: Whatever happened to...

The odd numbered versions for IP standards are the experimental or working drafts.

So IPv4 was preceeded by someone playing around in a standard called IPv3, IPv6 had IPv5 before it and IPv7 was being kicked about years ago as far as I know. I think this might be true for everything the standards body that deals with IPvX churns out.

The experimental odd versions are never designed for real world release but as test platforms to evaluate ideas.

T.a.f.T.

Re: A different solution

The odd numbered versions for IP standards are the experimental or working drafts. So IPv4 was preceeded by someone playing around in a standard called IPv3, IPv6 had IPv5 before it and IPv7 was being kicked about years ago as far as I know. I think this might be true for everything the standards body that deals with IPvX churns out. The experimental odd versions are never designed for real world release but as test platforms to evaluate ideas.

The dev-astating truth: What's left to develop? Send in the machines

T.a.f.T.

0 bugz

I remember reading something on the JPL's Laboratory for Reliable Software (LaRS) which suggested we were in the hunter gatherer or early metalworking (bronze age vs. composite material design) stages of programming. Agile is like the idea of crop rotation and organised teams of farmers. At some point in the future we will work out something like artificial fertilizers, pesticides and automated systems that would give us hundreds of times the output per-worker with much lower error rates. It took us a few hundred years to get finance as far as it has come today (which is still a bit error prone at times) so it seems reasonable to expect other professions like programming to take a century or two to find their stride.

TLDR; things are getting more productive but they will probably get hugely more productive and not be that recognizable to us as programming any more.

Scientists investigate 'dark lightning' threat to aircraft passengers

T.a.f.T.
Meh

Re: ISS?

Something about near and far fields? Although I don't think omnidirectional makes a difference there. Was it the near field that propagates at /r instead of /r^2.... so much EM theory that has leaked out of my brain now I just shuffle bits of a living.

Deadly domino effect of extinction proved by boffins

T.a.f.T.

Re: too simple a study

I tihnk it was 2 predators and 2 prey; of which each preditor had a preference for only one of the prey items but would take the other if it needed to. I agree it was a very simple model though but it is a start at least.

Just need to scale it up to use several game reserves and wipe out 1 big cat species in a reserve to see how the other cats do.

$1bn for Instagram? Knock yourself out, Facebook - UK watchdog

T.a.f.T.
Thumb Up

> "titties'n'kitties"

Sold! I will sign up now.

Cars, lorries stalked via GPS to create live traffic super-map

T.a.f.T.

Re: Ease congestion on the M25?

I was taught (about a decade ago) that however you slow down you should have your foot touching the break to make it clear to traffic behind you that you are slowing; that would also mean break lights from gear changing. The other idea is that by having your foot poises over the break reduces the reaction time a bit as most of time accelerating is not an option to get out of trouble (especially if your under 30 and male as you cannot insure a car that will do 70mph without the backing of a major bank!)

Murdoch pitches battery for renewables

T.a.f.T.

Would you like to know more?

Can you tell me more about this or provide a few reference links please?

[quote]Nuclear power folks in southern England have succeeded recently per BBC in getting wind farms / solar with Gravity storage in upland reservoirs taken out of the planning loop for needed non fossil fuel power grid use...[/quote]

India: We DO have the BlackBerry encryption keys

T.a.f.T.

Re: The Indian government is trying to reassure its population

That the Worlds Largest Democracy is also the one with the most corruption should not be that surprising. All large bureaucratic systems (be they notionally democratic or otherwise) have large problems. I doubt that I know 5% of what the UK government is doing though so I cannot make much comment about a government 1/3 of a world away.

Thanks for all this data, UK.gov, but what on Earth does it mean?

T.a.f.T.

Re: I prefer mine tartare

I agree that we should still get dumps of the raw data but they must be in an open machine readable format. I don't care if I can read a table of numbers when there are 50Billion of them, I care that I can tell a computer to pull out the bits I want or draw a graph for me. Scans are bad, .csv is OK.

Hopefully this will all get better over time as new records are made with the idea of someone reading them again rather than the old records that were to be kept because the policy says we should do... so no need to worry about being able to read them.

Apple demands Samsung flogged for 'unethical' court doc leak

T.a.f.T.

Re: Enough already!

I was always trained to keep a log book with dates and continuous updates because it could be used as a basis for patents. I would then have to sear that the dates I had written corresponded to the items I had detailed. It is not infallible and it would be forgeable but getting a handful of engineers or scientist to record informal documents are well as formal ones builds a case that the dates are real.

T.a.f.T.

Re: You don't

You shouldn't loose them either. The judge should be impartial, even in a US court.

If there is nothing illegal about publishing documents that are not part of the court case then I don't see the problem. The jury should not be reading anything that might be related to the trial and must disregard and in-submersible or unsubmitted evidence they might pick up in the real world. It might cause bad PR for the US legal system and for Apple but the press is partly there to make stupid actions look bad so the laws get updated. Checks, balances and all that jazz.

Amount of meat we eat will barely affect future climate change

T.a.f.T.
Thumb Up

Balanced View

And I like the key message here, read the numbers not the hype!

It is far too easy to divert people away from the key impactors (such as coal which is suggested here) into something relatively pointless such as eating less meat.

All of Europe's data in US servers? We're OK with that - EC bod

T.a.f.T.
Joke

But this new legislation is design to help people like you (be replaced with more foolish voters) by meaning that there is no longer a problem in sending civilian data anywhere in the EU or even the world. Does that not sound like a good thing, they are just making your job easier.

Climate scientists see 'tipping point' ahead

T.a.f.T.

Re: During the meanwhile ...

Did you raise the pig on crops you had grown yourself, make your own flour from your own crops and grow all the bits that make the IPA? If you did I hope you didn't use anything but compost you had made yourself on the soil? If not then you have used some of the vastly inefficient system of getting energy into humans that is our current farming system.

Vint Cerf: 'COMMUNISTS want to seize the INTERNET'

T.a.f.T.

Re: A meritocratic democracy...

Umm... no it is not.

A meritocratic democracy is one that recognises not all animals are equal and that those with greater merits should be given more of the control. Now the word merit is not defined so it could be intelligence, charisma, physical prowess or pretty much anything. It does not just mean that the rich, the intelligent or the loudest should get more of a say.

We must ask what our (I am from the UK but the EU and USA have recurrent themes) democracies have resulted in and who has ended up in charge. For the UK it is a bunch of people from the old boys club who went to old universities together. For the US it seems that they have had enough of a hereditary oligarchy and have picked someone way down the other end of a fairly narrow political spectrum. On the whole most things seem to be ticking along OK in the west, even if I did rather we pushed for more science, space and sustainability; I am one voice and must accept that I am in the minority.

Google+ dying on its arse – shock new poll

T.a.f.T.

Soul Motive

>The ad giant has ripped up its privacy policies and redesigned its consumer services around Google+

A lot of the privacy policies were also re-written so that other Google products could share data. True G+ was sold as the central hub to this but it is not the only reason. Now your gmail can share data with your gdocs, your search results can be even more linked to what you say and so on.

It never made much sense for 1 company to have dozens of user agreements when most users would happily agree to a single umbrella one that would provide for all the services. True when it started many people would have been miffed if gdocs had access to contact data and gmail was reading all you wrote but now that all the systems are established there is no huge fight back to what many see as a similication.

I do agree that Google would have liked to provide all the adds to it's very own Facebook and had a little more power to target those adds but "social search" is not yet that critical and I don't expect Google's revinues will die overnight if G+ fades away.

{I would also say that I see far more non-public posts than public ones from users}

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. - Humans begin artificial CO2 emissions

T.a.f.T.
Joke

Credit where credit is due

"disaster, as annoying British people worked out ways to turn burning fuel into useful energy wholesale"

Thanks for drawing attention to our achievements. BP (Once British Petroleum) messed up the gulf because we (as a species) are now hooked on fossil fuels thanks to a masterfully evil British plan. This is why we are always the villains in US media, isn't it.

Reg reader seeks living room Myth advice - can you help?

T.a.f.T.

Nearly Live

>The only thing is doesn't support is live TV playback - but does anyone watch things live anymore?

The other day I think I found that you can playback a recording as it is happening so if the TV is scheduled to record you can watch it almost live, even on a PS3. I have not tried it out though, I just found it interesting when I noticed it.

T.a.f.T.

PS3

I use my PlayStation 3 to view a lot of the stuff from my Myth box thanks to the UPNP hookup. If you want an excuse to buy one you can add that to it's tricks ontop of it being an OK BlueRay player.

T.a.f.T.

Acer Revo

I have an Acer Revo as my MythTV server and Front end in the living room, sits quite happily and quietly in a cabinet with a power, network and HDMI plug. Sadly I have not got the on-board tuner working with Linux yet but I solved that by plugging in an old Hauppapge USB tuner. The wireless keyboard/mouse that came with the version I bought works well enough as a remote for me.

If you cannot get something like that reasonably cheaply then any old laptop will probably cut the mustered.

Couple rewarded for naming newborn after Elder Scrolls Skyrim hero

T.a.f.T.

Tom

Surly the worst bit here is that they have named their child with an abbreviation rather than calling him Dovahkiin Thomas Kellermeyer (or Dovahkiin Tomas Kellermeyer as your preferences go).

Swedish college girls now twice as slutty as in 2001

T.a.f.T.

A dozen lucky guys

You only need a few dozen very active guys to sleep with several hundred women to give each of the ladies an average of a dozen partners (and the clap). Human and other primate mating patters do suggest that alpha male types tend to have a much higher number of partners (x10) than their less testosterone enriched counterparts whereas women tend to all have a fairly even spread.

(Statement made from memory so is probably only mildly more accurate than the average Wikipedia article)

Cabinet Office publishes open source procurement toolkit

T.a.f.T.

@Simon Jones1

Ah but then the government can hire another SW house to work on the product for them and fix it up to do whatever they like & when that project or SW house tanks they can hire another one to continue the work.

On top of that if some of the SW code is publicerlly available there is a chance some busy body with a half a brain will stop people running off down a totally stupid implementation root... well if they are lucky at least. Current problem is that they end up paying more and more to the same company as the alternative will be to start again from scratch; by hieing companies to contribute to open source code they might just get something that works without having to pump endless cash down a black hole.

T.a.f.T.

Development

As I pointed out to a post below, Open Source does not not stop HM Goverment from hieing firms to work on open source code. These firms could get all the backhanders that normal firms do, just that their open source code would have to be handed over to the government (or other parties that get the binaries).

Open Source is not the same as FOSS & even Open Source does not guarantee that everyone can have access to the code, only that people who are given binaries will also be given source. Personally as the government is paid for by taxes I think most of the code should be made available to public screwtany.

Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

T.a.f.T.

"The only thing he probably doesn't want to accept is that those being handcuffed probably don't care, don't know any different or most likely both."

I am sure he accepts it, that is probably he main worry.

If people go along with being handcuffed then it does make life easier for developers in a lot of ways and it should mean you can guarantee that the limited software you let run will work perfectly. Now market forces will mean that the company which can guarantee 100% uptime will end up with lots more customers (think of all the Macs that ended up in media in the 90s). More market share for them means less for everyone else & a greater chance that other people will copy their business model and lock down their own systems too. This will mean that more and more lock down happens while less and less market is left for those who do not lock down until all the non-lockdown crowd go bust.

That is why he cannot stop campaigning and why he also does not support Open Source because what he wants is Free/Libre/Lunch/Beer Software not just software that you can have the code for.

Zimbabwean claims prostitute turned into donkey

T.a.f.T.
Joke

Well he paid for ass

Simple mistake when you have had a few.

Insulin pump hack delivers fatal dosage over the air

T.a.f.T.
Headmaster

@Raumkrat, please define wireless

> Before implanted heart monitors/defibrillators had wireless functionality, there were models which could be read and manipulated using a sensor placed against the skin

So the sensor communicated with the heart monitor <what>erly?

I am guessing it involved RF or in induction, both of which generally lack strings of electrically conductive material. In fact the 10 year old code in the insulin shooter might be that same stuff just with a longer range wireless transceiver in it. No encryption over a 10cm range link = not a big problem; same protocol broadcast over 10m link = more of a problem.

Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked

T.a.f.T.
FAIL

Don't give them a URL! It took decades before the stars spelt out the one for the tz!

T.a.f.T.
Facepalm

TDP

The second link to TDP contains a statment that would surly be enough to throw out the case on day one?

"First, copyright law does not protect strictly-factual information. The Copyright Act only protects the expression of facts. 17 USC 102(b) clearly states:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."

Some grid co-ordinates and dates are facts & where did the atlas get these facts from in the first place? Is there a citation in the book? Wonder if Google books will let me read the copywrite & reference pages for free...

Deduplication: a power-hungry way to streamline storage

T.a.f.T.
Thumb Up

Short and sweet. The article covers most of the + and - of dedupe in a straight forward and digestible manner. The point about backup is a very important one and I expect lots of people will get a headache from their 1TB live system becoming a 12TB backup image!

Wales says no to outing Wikipedia users on Facebook

T.a.f.T.
Go

On a similar vein when will ElReg let us "Share this Comment" like they do with articles?

4G or 'faux G', it's a mealy-mouthed marketing mishmash

T.a.f.T.
FAIL

I wish it was not so much like real life

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-05-10/?Page=4

But it is...

Google unfurls Dead Sea Scrolls

T.a.f.T.

Optional

> There's a god in my national anthem,

Assuming UK here, in which case you don't have to sing it very often or every that but yes Head of State is Head of Church so those are still overlapping.

> there were prayers to a god in my school assemblies,

Does that mean you went to a CoE school? Many of them are but it does say it on the sign by the door.

> the cub scout promise I had to say every week was to a god,

Again, a Christian organisation to bring up young men with Christian values, you are going to end up mentioning god in there somewhere.

> the oath my MP swore was to a god,

Well I think we have the Head of State = Head or Church history thing to thank there again too. Does that mean that it has to be the Christian god or does any deity fit? Does this mean there are no non-Christian MPs?

> my doctors swore that they would not 'play god'.

I am not sure the hippopotinus oath is mandatory in the UK but again that is a non-specific deity; though I grant you an Atheist taking such an oath is worthless as there is no god so there is no action they can take which will be considered playing god.

Many cases people who don't want to religion could avoid it, yes it happens outside of temples but most of the time it is not a trick and you can avoid it if you check up on things first.

China links with Taiwan undersea

T.a.f.T.
Happy

Standards

Protocols allow you to communicate with the people you don’t trust :-)

HP: Still choosing the wrong women

T.a.f.T.

It is odd to see a split where people are saying "HP should have kept going the HP way and getting people from outside is what has ruined the company" and then have a comment like yours which says the exact opposite. Stale and needing shake is what the board thought when they started screwing it up a decade ago by the sounds of things. How many companies in recent history have managed to go through a fresh blood approach and still be alive 5years down the line?

Play.com swallowed by Rakuten

T.a.f.T.
Thumb Down

Small Beer

Changing a tax law (which in it's self must cost a fair bit to do) in order to generate £130M annually sounds like a very petty thing to do? Surly getting the MOD to buy light-bulbs from a standard wholesaler would be easier and more profitable?

EC: New principles agreed for out-of-print book licensing

T.a.f.T.

Abandon ware

What about out software that is no longer published? Or software code that is not accecable to the public? Plenty of good old games from companies that have gone down the pan lying around somewhere...

T.a.f.T.
Unhappy

Loop Hole

You may have identified a loop hole to allow a publishing house to hold on to works indefinably. If they offer a print of demand service where items are offered at the cost of a print run on 1 then they are not out of print or abandoned.

True paying the £200 for a work with some colour in it might be a bit steep to make it viable for the customer but that is not the point (you think they will offer soft back or digital prints?)

CERN's boson hunters tackle big data bug infestation

T.a.f.T.
Angel

Bugs are like tpypos

They get everywhere:

> Do does this now mean ROOT is bug-free?

No. Perhaps spacing keyboard keys further apart would stop people bashing in the wrong characters in there code?

Attention metal thieves: Buy BT, get 75 MILLION miles of copper

T.a.f.T.
WTF?

Landed

BT ownes a lot of prime land in the centre of many towns ideal for office, retail or housing space too. They currently use their empty concrete piles to house a couple of servers, park a few vans and rent out bags of roof space to mobile telecom people! Surly that must make them worth something?

Smut domain scores big bucks for not handling smut

T.a.f.T.
Joke

B

better use a capital B in there so you can claim it is a different trademark... well it works for iPhone?

LightSquared offers low-power olive branch to GPS

T.a.f.T.

Fly by wire

Think of a computer landing the plane, in the fog. These will use precision GPS to position the plane relative to the run way on approach, during the touchdown and taxi it to the runway. There is a university in Germany doing lots of research into the safety aspects of it a the moment.

T.a.f.T.

?

I don't follow, last time I was working in the GPS receiver bizz the public part of the system was pritty good at following the standard?

Cloud startup's business model defies laws of physics

T.a.f.T.
Facepalm

Drive level

If they dedup at the hard drive level then there are only so many sequences of bytes you can have. If they do not know what is file and what is directory then your client must hold all of that infromation & they would not be able to use hash keys to identify files.

With several Petabytes of data even "random" content such as encryption is going to have a few matching patterns; true they cannot identify that you and your Facebook friend have the same slide in a power point slide but they don't need to. I don't see why every client needs to share any keys, I think the power point analogy in the article has sent people down the wrong mental street.

T.a.f.T.

See below

It can work just fine if you deduplicate stripes of drive data rather than files; there are only so many combinations of #kB of data so I would have thought that with enough drive space even random data (which is what encrypted data should look like) will start to have a few patters.

Anti-gay bus baron rages at being stuffed in Google closet

T.a.f.T.

Dangerous words

"when people use it to try and stop us from agreeing with the majority, we're in trouble"

"We need to re-educate people like this into being able to think freely"

From the sound of the article he is trying to censor the education of young people but not saying that homosexuality it's self is wrong, only that it is wrong to promote it. I am sure in reality his opinion is that it is wrong but that he realizes that such a stance will not get his cause anywhere.

50 years ago most people probably viewed homosexuality as wrong and without the minority who were using their free speech to say that it was OK we would not tolerate it today. You cannot choose who you grant free speech too and must accept that along with what you want & like to hear you will also get plenty of things you will not like.

‘We save trips to the library’ – Google

T.a.f.T.

1.7GW

Somewhere down there they say "these projects represent a total capacity of over1.7GW, which is far more electricity than we use"

1.7GW = 1,700MW

1,700MW << 2,259,998 MWh

365d * 24h * 1.7GW = 14,892GWh = 14,892,000MWh

So they have enough Green project work to cover x5 there usage?

Electric cars: too pricey until 2030 (or later)

T.a.f.T.
Mushroom

LPG

If more people switched to LPG (approx 20% less CO2 output than petrol) we could reduce the amount due to traffic by a bit. LPG conversion kits are available now and work with lots of existing cars & we have a supply infrastructure in place. (I drive one and think it is great, so I am totally bias).

I did think of writing to the plod and ambulance services to ask them if they would switch their fleets over as both of them are high mileage and should save quite a few tones of CO2 if it knocks 20% off.

<- No they dont do that when you crash, you are already carrying plenty of petrol and it does not constantly ex plod!

Jesus appears, acquires vast following, bitchslaps Justin Bieber

T.a.f.T.
Trollface

Jehova

well I got you started with the name. We could say time began with the earth (as we measure age in earths cycles around the sun) so the bible says something like 12k years? and Radio 1 says there are people without a gender set so that works too.

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